Let’s be honest for a second: Salad is usually not the most delicious thing on a menu. Salad—not the highfalutin, ramps-and-pine-nuts kind, but the patriotic, iceberg-lettuce-and-a-petrified-tomato-wedge kind—is the food you order when you’re at a place where you’re expected to be eating food (chain restaurants, broadly), but it’s a time of year when you should not really be eating the food they serve there (the seemingly 10-month annual timespan known as “swimsuit season”). Salad is a necessity, a type of proto-Soylent. In its purest form, it says, “I’m taking care of a basic bodily need, but it’s just crunchy water!” Salad, at its best, feels like a strategically good choice without being truly satisfying to the soul, like dating someone who’s not that smart, but has a beach-adjacent timeshare.

Salad has its faults, and it knows it. It’s healthy, but it will never win the popularity contest against your Chipotle burritos, or even your Quizno’s subs. So the one thing salad should really never be is less healthy than a Big Mac. A Big Mac! It’s the sandwich that’s shorthand for everything that’s wrong with the American diet.

And yet, a new report from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine points out 100 restaurant salads that are “worse” than a Big Mac. The group defines “worse” in terms of saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, and calories, of which a Big Mac has 550, according to PCRM. (McDonald’s says the famous burger has only 530.) According to PCRM, a Big Mac also contains 29 grams of fat, 75 mg of cholesterol, and 970 mg of sodium.

There’s plenty to be skeptical about here: PCRM promotes a vegetarian diet and opposes the use of animals in scientific research, and it’s received plenty of criticism from the American Medical Association as a result. Also, many of these salads bring fibrous, nutritious ingredients like spinach and beets along for the sodium-and-fat ride, so “worse than” is in the eye of the beholder, to a certain extent.

Still, the group has a point: Some mass-produced salads are basically nachos in disguise. Once something comes with “freshly toasted three-cheese quesadillas,” it’s not a salad, it’s a Super-Bowl party appetizer.

What explains consumers’ continued willingness to order calorie-bomb salads? In at least one study, researchers found that customers perceived a food item that was presented in a “healthier” food category, like salad, to be more wholesome than a similar item that had identical ingredients but was listed under a less-healthy category, like pasta. (This might scientifically be known as the “But it’s the light Ben & Jerry’s” principle.)

And paradoxically, just by listing salads on the menu, restaurants can prompt customers to order even less healthy (and more expensive) fare. Thanks to a mind trick called "vicarious goal fulfillment," a person can feel that his goal of healthy eating is met by simply seeing a salad on the menu and considering ordering it—before ultimately going with the house sirloin. You don’t have to know how unhealthy the Quesadilla Explosion Salad is. You don’t even have to point to it on the shiny trifold menu and glance bashfully at the waiter. You think you’re eating healthier just because the word “salad” is there.

If you’d like a salad that doesn’t have the calorie count of a body-builder’s last meal, PCRM recommends avoiding creamy dressings, skipping the cheese, and topping the dish with beans instead of bacon. (“Chickpeas are a tasty addition to almost any salad,” the group notes dubiously.)

Or you could admit that you want something salty, greasy, and cheese-slathered, and eat the Big Mac already.

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